Climate-Friendly Stream Crossings Toolkit

Welcome to the Climate-Friendly Stream Crossings Toolkit. Climate-friendly road-stream crossings are embedded or open bottom crossing structures that maintain the natural characteristics of the stream as it passes under the road, thereby allowing the unimpeded movement of water, fish and other organisms, sediment, and woody debris.

This short video explains the importance of climate-friendly culverts:

On the following pages you will find a compilation of resources and tools spanning a range of topics, developed by many different organizations working to improve road-stream crossings.

These resources are intended to be used at a variety of scales – from small watershed to state or even regional – and by a variety of organizations, including watershed groups, conservation organizations, universities, and natural resource and transportation departments.

The toolkit is organized in a sequential order in terms of key steps for addressing aquatic connectivity through infrastructure redesign. If you are just beginning this work, we encourage you to read through the entire toolkit and utilize appropriate resources from each section. If you have been engaged in this work for some time, you may have already completed assessments and a prioritization, but other sections of the toolkit may be useful.

This online toolkit was prepared by the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy with funding from the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Climate Adaptation Fund, which is made possible by the generous support of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and from the U.S. Department of Interior through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s Hurricane Sandy Coastal Resiliency Program.

We thank our many collaborators – especially colleagues from The Nature Conservancy, the University of Massachusetts, Maine Audubon, and American Rivers – for their contributions to this toolkit.

If you would like to contribute to this toolkit, please contact Jessica Levine.